Challenges in 3D Visualization for Mars Exploration Rover Mission

The Science Activity Planner (SAP), currently under development by our group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will be the primary tool used for science data assessment and science activity planning during the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. As part of its data visualization capability, SAP interactively displays 3D terrain surface data corresponding to the MER image data products. These datasets can be very large, e.g. on the order of tens of millions of vertices for a panorama, so it is a challenge to load and display them at interactive speeds on a workstation. We describe the software techniques we are implementing to address this challenge and present recent test results. A fundamental development is the new Visible Scalable Terrain (ViSTa) format, a flexible and precise interchange format for terrain data. Other developments include multi-threaded asynchronous event-driven data loading, practical heuristics for geometry LOD and texture resolution selection, multilevel garbage-collector friendly data caching, and an optimized ray intersection system

Distributed Operations for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission with the Science Activity Planner

Due to the length of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, most scientists were unable to stay at the central operations facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This created a need for distributed operations software, in the form of the Distributed Science Activity Planner. The distributed architecture saved a considerable amount of money and increased the number of individuals who could be actively involved in the mission, contributing to its success